Baumgarten's body of work included ephemeral sculptures, photographic work, slide projection pieces, 16 mm film works, recordings, drawings, prints, books, short stories, as well as site-specific works and wall drawings and architecture related interventions. Between 1968 and 1970, Baumgarten undertook a systematic photographic study of how several European ethnographic museums frame the viewer's perception through the manner in which their objects are displayed. The eighty Ektachromes that comprise Baumgarten's slide projection
Unsettled Objects (1968–69) show artifacts at the
Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, displayed much as they were when it was opened to the public in 1874. Between 1977 and 1986 Baumgarten visited
Brazil and
Venezuela. During an eighteen-month period between 1978 and 1980, the artist lived among the
Yãnomãmi people of Kashorawë-their and Nyapetawë-their in the upper
Orinoco region. There were about 85 people in this particular community, which at that time had had relatively little contact with the outside world. Baumgarten's visits resulted in works such as
Terra Incognita (1969–84), a three-dimensional diagram of the frontier between the two countries. A later work,
El Dorado – Gran Sabana (1977–85), juxtaposes photographs of the rich landscape of the
La Gran Sabana region, the site of the legendary
El Dorado, which Baumgarten took in 1977 with the names of heavy metals and minerals mined in the area during the 1980s; the names of indigenous animals being exterminated by the mining process are linked with the metals and minerals.
River-Crossing, Kashorawetheri (1978), a suite of 15 black-and-white photographs, follows a group of Yãnomãmi on an arduous journey through a forest and across a waterway.
Fragmento Brasil (1977-2005), a synchronized multi-projection piece without sound, is made up of paired sequences of 648 images from three sources: details from
Albert Eckhout's mid-17th-century paintings of Brazilian birds set in idealized landscapes of European provenance; the abstract drawings of Yãnomãmi people from Venezuela and Brazil, 1978–80; and in conjunction, black & white landscape photographs of the
Rio Caroni,
Rio Uraricoera and
Rio Branco regions in Venezuela and Brazil taken by the artist on a five-month walk in 1977. What remains are their names, which live on in the network of the railroads:
Cheyenne and Northern Railway,
Apache Railway,
Keokuk Junction Railway or
Monongahela Railway. Other names continue to exist only as geographic designations:
Potomac River,
Coconino County, and
Chemehuevi Mountains. The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles commissioned Baumgarten to create a work that incorporated the photo documentation of his trip; however, the intended piece was never realized. Instead, the photographs were later published along with eleven short stories in an artists' book titled "Carbon." For his 1993 six-week solo exhibition at the
Guggenheim Baumgarten printed the names of indigenous North American peoples on the inner curves of the rotunda. In 1994, Baumgarten landscaped the modern medium-sized woodland garden full of weeds and wild flowers for the
Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain designed by
Jean Nouvel. The garden's name,
Theatrum Botanicum, refers to the inventories of medicinal plants and herbs kept by medieval monks. In the late 1990s, he was commissioned with an installation at the
Bundespräsidialamt. In 2002, he received a commission for
Seven Rings for Contemplation, a permanent public artwork for Denning's Point State Park in Beacon, New York. For
Concordance (2003-2006), a series of c-prints, Baumgarten conducted an extensive survey of the setting and botany of the
Serralves Park in Porto. == Exhibitions ==